First Post
2/6/17
I chose this book because William Gibson is the creator and writer of my all time favorite genre, cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a genre or lifestyle depending on who you are revolving around the idea of a dark, corrupted, corroding dystopian future in which humans have integrated themselves with machine and most wildlife has gone extinct. If you have ever seen the movie blade runner, that is a prime example of cyberpunk at its finest. In a cyberpunk world, people may intwine their minds with the net and move around freely as though they were there physically. In the case of a cyberpunk world most clothes are synthetic and there is no longer room to expand outward instead building up buildings over each other. The other reason I am very interested in this book is because it is the third and final book in a series referred to as The Sprawl Trilogy, in which there are different characters and storylines in each book but the same world and setting. Even though technology has evolved so far the books stick more to the immediate solar system as opposed to the vast known universe. In previous books, Gibson has used large and uncommon words as opposed to simple and like minded ways of thought. Many of these words, phrases, and entire paragraphs can be followed by the reader needing to take a break and think deeply about what is said by the characters. A Gibson book has multiple main characters each with their own mini story, all joining together into a much larger picture. One of my favorite things about reading a book like this is that you get to understand the views people had on future technology decades before present time. Mona Lisa Overdrive is about a girl named Mona, a teen prostitute, who looks an awful lot like a famous celebrity, this story arc follows the outcome of being hired by a shady group of individuals for what they call a “gig”. The second arc in Mona Lisa Overdrive is about a girl named Kumiko who is the on the run from her father, a mob boss of the famed Japanese Yakuza’s. The third arc is about a robotics artist called Slick Henry who is hired to look after Count Zero who is hooked into the world’s largest hard drive capable of storing all of reality. The fourth and final arc is about a girl named Angela Mitchell who can access cyberspace with nothing but her brain. I am definitely looking forward to this book and can’t wait until I get further in.